4 million songs on Spotify have never been played. Let’s change that

http://forgotify.com/

by henryaj • 12 years ago

170 81 12 years ago

forgotify.com

defcon84• 12 years ago

i only get Indian music :p

jessevanhouten• 12 years ago

Getting mainly german schlagers here

nyrina• 12 years ago

Mexican music here.

hrkristian2• 12 years ago

I actually hit gold first time around, Dorothy Shay - Blah Blah Blah

struct• 12 years ago

Seem to be getting lots of obscure 70s Chinese funk [1]

[1] https://play.spotify.com/album/3JZwG20VxZxNr5mgjYMlw0

arvidj• 12 years ago

Would be nice to have a counter of the number of forgotten songs, updating in realtime.

maaarghk• 12 years ago

I absolutely agree!

wyclif• 12 years ago

503 Error.

gizzlon3• 12 years ago

This is great for hipsters who want to start listening to a band before they're popular :)

Since the chances are kind of slim, you'd have to listen to a lot..

jbrooksuk• 12 years ago

Thou shalt not stop liking a band just because they have become popular.[1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWrMGXwhFLk

oneeyedpigeon• 12 years ago

Yeah, you just gotta tough it out; eventually, every band becomes unpopular again ;)

test1235• 12 years ago

There probably a very good reason why people don't listen to those songs ;)

zimpenfish2• 12 years ago

Well, I can vouch for Dimitris Arapakis being a bit hard going.

Imagine a half speed version of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn mating with a Klezmer band and you'd be about right.

Joeboy• 12 years ago

Imagine a half speed version of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn mating with a Klezmer band and you'd be about right.

Thanks, I will definitely be checking this out later.

twistedpair• 12 years ago

What's a revelation about this? I recall taking out esoteric library books in college that had the vintage checkout cards in the back. Last checkout for the book was 20 years ago. There's a reason they have a music category called "Pop."

colomon• 12 years ago

I tried to do a book report on The Three Musketeers in high school, only to discover the local library had discarded its only copy because no one had checked it out in years. (This was a few years before Amazon and Project Gutenburg, with no bookstore in town. Nowadays I own two different translations in print and have another on my phone.)

mmahemoff• 12 years ago

Does OP or anyone know how it's built?

I see there's a track popularity figure in the API [1] so maybe these songs have zero popularity. And then I can only assume they've crawled every track as the search API [2] doesn't support filtering by popularity.

1. https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/lookup/

2. https://developer.spotify.com/technologies/web-api/search/

henryaj• 12 years ago

Sorry, I don't. Your explanation sounds pretty plausible.

wldlyinaccurate2• 12 years ago

I'm gonna be "that guy" and complain again that developers (web developers in particular) really need to learn the basics of scaling. There is no point having your app publicly available if you're not prepared for small spikes like this.

Edit: At the time of posting, the service was 503ing.

mattmanser• 12 years ago

Learning to be a developer is still a hodge-podge, unstructured process, scaling is definitely not taught and often talked about in extremely abstract terms because a lot of authors have no clue themselves what is and isn't scalable.

A small VM can take huge amounts of traffic thrown at it. If you happen to be running basic PHP. But install wordpress and it's a whole other story.

Often until you've been hit by a spike like this you won't even know what is and isn't scalable.

rhizome3• 12 years ago

That's because scaling is not in the domain of developers, as much as Heroku/AWS/etc. strive to blur the lines. It's in system administration and architecture.

vitalique• 12 years ago

Well, this link is also on Reddit's front page now.

coldtea• 12 years ago

I'm gonna be "that guy" and complain again that developers (web developers in particular) really need to learn the basics of scaling.

Why, would anything bad happen to the developer if his toy app breaks down under the pressure?

fauigerzigerk• 12 years ago

Because the reason he made it is probably that he wants it to be used. If it can't be used that is bad.

dasil003• 12 years ago

Web developers are learning the basics of scaling. Hell, this guy is learning right now.

troels• 12 years ago

Scaling, like security or maintainability, is a really fluffy and cross cutting concept. It's hard to get it right without having a gradual increase in load. So talking about the "basics" is a bit unfair, I think.

gizzlon3• 12 years ago

Is there a service that tests the scale of web apps? I'm not thinking of software, rather a service that web developers could use to test their app with simulated "real" traffic..

taylan• 12 years ago

There is Loader.io from SendGrid (http://loader.io/) that lets you load test your web apps with thousands of concurrent connections.

wldlyinaccurate2• 12 years ago

I've used https://www.blitz.io/ with some success

rajbala• 12 years ago

In other words the developer should prematurely scale?

chris_wot• 12 years ago

Needing to scale is a good problem to have.

cinitriqs• 12 years ago

I second that!

stef25• 12 years ago

Only the lucky ones need to scale :)

mhurron• 12 years ago

Is there a place to learn how to scale? Even just the basics or a getting started or something?

As someone else pointed out, learning to program is often done on your own, so where would someone go to learn this on their own outside of the hot seat?

gmu3• 12 years ago

I really like reading posts on High Scalability: http://highscalability.squarespace.com/start-here/

hadem• 12 years ago

Perhaps their budget (both in terms of time and money) doesn't allow for it...? Don't default to the web developer incapable or disregarding scalability.

kahirsch• 12 years ago

There was a funny story[1] (transcript[2]) on the NPR program On The Media a couple of weeks ago about someone[3] who writes and records dozens of songs per day to put on Spotify (playlist[4]). Many songs deserve to not be played.

[1] http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/

[2] http://www.onthemedia.org/story/100-songs-day/transcript/

[3] http://www.moternmedia.com/bio.html

[4] http://spoti.fi/1gnQ7nd

gagege• 12 years ago

I don't know, "Seaching for Sugarman" is a pretty good Rolling Stones approximation. Adam Sandler made a pretty legit music career out of stuff kind of like this.

eyko• 12 years ago

I thought poop into a wormhole wasn't too bad, the lyrics I mean.

joe_the_user• 12 years ago

Sure,

But why listen to a "Rolling Stones approximation" when you can listen to the Stones.

As far as I can tell, a large of portion of bands aiming to make it are indeed good or bad approximations of existing pop bands and mover over, entirely aimed at satisfied the fairly uniform taste of mainstream audiences.

Most are poor approximations of this but a few are indeed good approximations of this. But it doesn't matter.

The problem is that none of these develop anything creative or more specifically, they aren't serving any taste pool but this wide mainstream (this is arguably necessary for their success - they are practicing at being good at specific skill, being alternative wouldn't be the same practice).

So even, especially with even, bands being "almost good", there's still no reason for me to listen.

jaynos• 12 years ago

Couldn't see the original page due to the 503 error, but my immediate thought was that the guy from the OTM story was trying to get more song plays.

lost_name• 12 years ago

There are also hundreds of "cover" songs on Spotify that, from what I can tell, only try to earn plays through mistaken clicks.

For a good example, search for Thrift Shop -- you might be inclined to play "Thrift Shop" by "Thrift Shop" on his hit album "Thrift Shop." It has 675k plays already.

ilamont• 12 years ago

AC/DC has an interesting twist related to cover bands -- the band only has one song (through an old soundtrack) on Spotify. About a dozen cover bands have filled the gap; the top tunes for each of them collectively have over a million listens.

Kiro• 12 years ago

I don't think it's about misclicks only. Another reason they get plays is because they automatically get queued and go on after the real deal when you search for a specific track.

chipsambos• 12 years ago

This is the antithesis to sites promoting quality content (hn, reddit, etc). It only encourages people to publish shit. Like this guy: http://www.gigwise.com/news/88051/spotify-joker-earns-%C2%A3...

May as well try and rack up views for all the unseen ads on the internet.

hrkristian2• 12 years ago

I'd argue this is not as you say, but rather another step towards decentralised marketing.

Because Spotify has its own ranking system and social media/last.fm scrobbling, while a bad song will merely be skipped over, a good undiscovered song with get saved to playlist and exposed via networks to a much greater extent than it had a chance of being before.

bgilroy26• 12 years ago

The "Knights of 'New'" on reddit have to wade through a lot of junk, but everyone else who uses the website benefits from their efforts.

This is a similar deal for Spotify. Some percentage of these songs are good, it might be less than one percent, but if you can get 500 people with decent ears to listen to 1 song each, you can move the needle.

MartinCron• 12 years ago

Yeah, when that guy was covered recently in the TLDR Podcast, there was no mention that he was basically spamming, and we shouldn't be glorifying people who are making a huge mess while scrounging around for change in the couch cushions of the internet.

philipb• 12 years ago

"Sorry, we're not available where you are. Leave your email to stay tuned for good news."

Thanks Forgotify!

kissickas• 12 years ago

I really wanted to listen to the first random song, as well! What is the "I have Spotify" button for? It doesn't work for me... I was hoping that would let me log into my (US) account without being in the country, but nothing happens when I click it.

zimpenfish2• 12 years ago

It's not very (at the track level) - but at the same far too (at the 'release' level) - accurate.

"Wayward Wind" by Gogi Grant (off "Sweet Memories") is listed -but- the track itself is listed as one of the most popular if you search for her, just not off that particular album. There's a metric ass-ton of releases which probably explains why one particular release has zero even when the track is clearly very popular.

F-. MUST TRY HARDER.

hesselink• 12 years ago

This is very annoying on Spotify itself as well. If you use the 'radio' feature (basically random tracks based on some genre/artist), it often repeats the same track over and over, from different releases.

ajtaylor• 12 years ago

Oh, so THAT'S why it repeats tracks! I always assumed that the radio feature just wasn't very smart.

treskot• 12 years ago

HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

tehwalrus• 12 years ago

I got a cool looking jazz trumpet piece, but it seems to want me to sign up for a Spotify account. I guess I should have known, I'm just too used to sound cloud.

jsumrall• 12 years ago

Fun times listening to:

Lesson 7: Education and Government part 5 by Morris Schreiber

mediaserf• 12 years ago

Their cache engine will love you for this!

FigBug2• 12 years ago

When DistroKid launched, I put a song on iTunes, Amazon and Spotiy. So far it has had no sales, but 3 streams, earning me 2 cents.

I highly suggest everybody streams 'Goatsemon - Penis Bird' or buys it on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Penis-Bird-Explicit/dp/B00FQS30W6

samweinberg• 12 years ago

I'd rather download it off the Pirate Bay.

FigBug2• 12 years ago

I just checked, it's not there. But it is on YouTube and my old Geocities page has been mirrored. You could find it if you wanted too, but it's not worth the effort.

ctdonath• 12 years ago

4M? Interesting. One of the recurring themes of "long tail" discussions is that everything is requested at least once every month or so. Would like more consideration of why that's not the case here.

MrRage2• 12 years ago

I was in a band in my college years that played this "indie / experimental" instrumental rock. We only played maybe a dozen shows that were sparsely attended. There's one show we played that had at least 50-100 people, but that was because we opened for a semi-popular local band. In 2003-2004, just about when I left the band, we recorded an album in on of the band member's bedroom. I doubt more than a handful of people have ever listened to it.

This album is on Spotify. If it has any listens it's probably because I listened to it, or maybe another one of the former band members did.

techtalsky2• 12 years ago

Alright what is it. Now I want to hear it.

urmane• 12 years ago

Most songs don't deserve to be listened to.

In the old days one had no choice - whatever was on the radio was what you heard, and it was very difficult to hear the whole CD/tape/ancient-media. I used to have a 3-4 song rule - if I didn't like 3-4 songs on the album I wouldn't buy it. It was very hard to adhere to, and breaking the rule almost always resulted in disappointment.

MP3 changed that, but not because of pirating - because listeners could start sampling the whole product to see if they wanted to buy it. Tech improvements keep making that easier. Bands will have to work harder to produce quality work for their fans (including having a good handle on what 'quality' and 'fans' means for them), instead of producing one good song and ten fillers and calling it an album.

wiremine• 12 years ago

Spotify has around 20 million songs [1], so around 20% of songs are never played.

Two random questions:

- How much is Spotify paying to host those unplayed songs?

- How many of songs have a small number of plays? (< 5 plays, for example)?

[1] http://press.spotify.com/us/information/

drharris• 12 years ago

Storage is cheap with digital music. Even assuming 10 MB/song, you're looking at 40TB, less than $4k/mo on S3. It's not trivial, but it's probably a drop in the bucket compared to their other costs. Realistically the file sizes are much less than 10MB.

janinge• 12 years ago

They have multiple encodes in various qualities for each title too, though.

barlescabbage• 12 years ago

Surprisingly, just heard a song that I loved on it, http://open.spotify.com/track/6cZ1tXMm5BaYQzddgcY7W9

brokenparser• 12 years ago

It would be nice to have this as a real Spotify app, they're written in HTML5 so it's pretty easy to do.

archemike_• 12 years ago

I was going to listen then I saw how the extension was Coldfusion...

4 million songs on Spotify have never been played. Let’s change that

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